Center for Transportation Research and Education

About the research

Departments of transportation and the motor carrier industry are looking toward Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to increase highway transportation safety and efficiency through streamlining and automating current processes and improving regulatory enforcement and infrastructure and fleet management. Many of these possible benefits can only be realized through large-scale, regional or even national implementations of ITS for commercial vehicle operations (ITS-CVO).

These large-scale deployments will, at a minimum, require some cooperation among states. Current state business practices and the legacy systems developed to support them may, however, stand as significant impediments to such cooperation for ITS-CVO development and implementation. Prior research and experience have shown that institutional barriers to ITS-CVO can be significant. The FHWA-funded state studies of intrastate institutional barriers to ITS-CVO have shown there are a number of significant issues that can impede ITS-CVO implementation. These issues range from a lack of communication and cooperation among state agencies with commercial vehicle regulatory or taxation duties to business practices and legal codes that do not accommodate the new practices and technologies of ITS-CVO. Similarly, research and demonstration projects have been stymied by problematic barriers resulting from such institutional issues.

This two-phase research project involved seven midwestern states: Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The research identifies long-range institutional issues that could impede multi-state cooperation for development and deployment of ITS-CVO and offers possible approaches for mitigating such issues.